Lex Communis

Welcome to Lex Communis - the most respected blog in all of north-central Fresno County

I am a practicing business-litigation and plaintiff's employment law trial attorney. This site generally focuses on my interests, which include history, philosophy, religion, science, science fiction and law.
Disclosure: I write with an unrepentant neo-Conservative, Catholic, pro-Western Civilization bias.

//But here’s my question: Why aren’t the seven witnesses to Dendinger’s nonexistent assault on Cassard already facing felony charges? Why are all but one of the cops who filed false reports still wearing badges and collecting paychecks? Why aren’t the attorneys who filed false reports facing disbarment? Dendinger’s prosecutors both filed false reports, then prosecuted Dendinger based on the reports they knew were false. They should be looking for new careers — after they get out of jail.

If a group of regular citizens had pulled this on someone, they’d all likely be facing criminal conspiracy charges on top of the perjury and other charges. So why aren’t these cops and prosecutors?

I could be wrong, but my guess is that they’ll all be let off due to “professional courtesy” or some sort of exercise of prosecutorial discretion. And so the people who ought to be held to a higher standard than the rest of us will once again be held to a lower one.//

From the very first moments of the terrorist attack on the U.S. compound in Benghazi on September 11, 2012, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her top aides were advised that the compound was under a terrorist attack. In fact, less than two hours into the attack, they were told that the al-Qaeda affiliate in Libya, Ansar al-Sharia, had claimed responsibility. These revelations and others are disclosed by a trove of e-mails and other documents pried from the State Department by Judicial Watch in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. The FOIA litigation focuses on Mrs. Clinton’s involvement in the government actions before, during, and after the Benghazi attack, in which Christopher Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya, was murdered by terrorists. Also killed in the attack were State Department information management officer Sean Smith, and two former Navy SEALs, Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty, who were contract security employees and who had fought heroically, saving numerous American lives. At least ten other Americans were wounded, some quite seriously. At 4:07 p.m., just minutes after the terrorist attack began, Cheryl Mills, Secretary Clinton’s chief-of-staff, and Joseph McManus, Mrs. Clinton’s executive assistant, received an e-mail from the State Department’s operations center (forwarded to her by Maria Sand, a special assistant to Secretary Clinton). It contained a report from the State Department’s regional security officer (RSO), entitled “U.S. Diplomatic Mission in Benghazi is Under Attack.” The e-mail explained that approximately 20 armed people had fired shots at the diplomatic mission, that explosions had been heard as well, and that Ambassador Stevens was believed to be in the compound with at least four other State Department officials.

// An anti-abortion and euthanasia society ratified last week has been branded “disgusting” by students.

Life Matters, a group dedicated to awareness and understanding of pro-life issues including abortion, euthanasia and embryonic cell research, formed on Friday after being approved by YUSU’s Societies Committee.

But despite similar groups existing at other universities, its ratification at York has sparked a backlash from students and pro-choice campaigners.

// Rather, many of the challenges facing marriage today are bound up with a much larger shift in man’s understanding of himself as a person, and this new anthropology goes hand in hand with our Western culture’s evolving understanding of marriage and family. “Marriage,” writes Wendell Berry, “has now taken the form of divorce: a prolonged and impassioned negotiation as to how things shall be divided. During their understandably temporary association, the ‘married’ couple will typically consume a large quantity of merchandise and a large portion of each other.”5 Though seemingly paradoxical, Berry’s description reveals accurately that marriage is perceived today as a type of contractual relation established by two human freedoms. Rather than giving all of one’s life, as love requires, in this contract spouses give only a portion of themselves. This partial giving entails that, in their life together, each spouse cannot but try to avoid losing what he is afraid of giving away to the other, that is, himself. Yet, because he does not give all of himself, he must work to keep himself; that is, he must seek to preserve or increase what he considers indispensable for his own happiness: property, pleasure, and, ultimately, power. If living thus becomes a matter of possessing instead of receiving and giving, then, as Berry indicates, spousal love does not establish any real unity. The negotiated “form” of marriage never constitutes a real whole, that is, a communion of life and love. Understood simply as a contract, marriage becomes the mutually agreed-upon juxtaposition of two existences that lasts as long as negotiations endure. Lacking an objective form greater than the spouses’ singular existences, married life is not only deprived of the grounds that enable it to weather the disintegrating forces that erode any nuptial communion; it also actively—albeit most of the time unwittingly—contributesto its own fragmentation.//

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"So you see how endlessly futile and fruitless it would be if we wanted to refute their objections every time they obstinately resolved not to think through what they say but merely to speak, just so long as they contradict our arguments in any way they can."— Augustine of Hippo